The PlayStation 4 has now been in our lives for 10 years, which is, quite impressively, par for the course for a PlayStation console. But there’s something different about the PS4 continuing to thrive. Compared to where the PS1, 2, or 3 were at the decade-old mark, the PS4 doesn’t feel like it’s in its twilight, instead happily co-existing as a still-viable option right alongside its newer, flashier brother. That certainly made sense in those dark pandemic days when the PS4 was more readily available, but even some three years after the PS5’s launch, there are still a few key ways in which the PS4 can lord over the PS5.
Custom Themes
Yes, Sony, it’s very nice that every game creates its own little hub on the PS5’s XMB with its own music, updates, and whatnot. But this is no replacement for one of the coolest things about owning a PS4. Not only could you upload your own wallpaper and make the background whatever you want, but PSN was awash in custom dynamic themes, with their own icons, background music, moving backgrounds, and animations.
Granted, there are plenty of low-quality themes clogging up the works when you actually search for one, but there are loads of gems, too. Hell, a custom theme was one of the few bonuses that genuinely made a preorder worth the extra money. Persona 5’s, in particular, were absolutely beautiful, and there was an entire collection of them. Untitled Goose Game’s theme, with the goose stealing a random item every time you went up and down the XMB, was brilliant. It made your PS4 feel like your own. There’s much less ability to do that with the PS5.
PS Vita Remote Play
Just this past month, Sony launched the PlayStationPortal, which is basically a DualSense controller grafted to a custom screen that can connect to the PS5 for Remote Play over good Wi-Fi. If you travel a lot, that may be a sound investment, but it’s still a step down from the PS4 and a poor, neglected little device called the PS Vita.
In the past, for the same price as the PlayStation Portal in 2023, you could’ve gotten a full-blown gaming powerhouse that not only could do Remote Play and play its own criminally underrated library of games–a few of which even had cross-play with the PS4, so you were even less tethered to the home console–but a system that could operate as a second screen in games like Tearaway, LittleBigPlanet 3. Dead Nation, and Wolfenstein: The New Order. The Tearaway second-screen functionality in particular was a crucial part of that experience, especially since the Vita’s camera got in on the fun.
Even more than that, the Vita wasn’t reliant on Wi-Fi if you had the model that included cell service, an idea that felt over-the-top back then, but would be an absolutely baller addition to a handheld now. The PS5 has a luxury Backbone for a remote play option. The PS4 had a technical marvel.
3D Blu-ray Compatibility
To be fair, it’s far from Sony’s fault alone that the home theater industry failed to make 3D TV A Thing. But it is Sony’s fault for giving players the most widely available version of it and snatching it away one generation later.
The PS4 has been able to play 3D Blu-rays since a patch in early 2014. This was initially only of use to the small audience with 3D TVs . That changed, however, once Sony unveiled the PSVR and, in a truly awesome move, made the headset fully able to process 3D Blu-ray video. The PSVR was already an underrated little device for cinephiles, since it displayed movies in a way that basically gave users their own personal IMAX.
Being able to toss on 3D movies was a game-changer, and right away, all those neglected 3D Blu-rays floating around the market suddenly had a new lease on life. Though the stream of new ones has slowed to a trickle, they still occur, with Avatar: The Way of Water and the recent Arrow release of Martin Scorsese’s Hugo releasing with 3D discs just this year.
Unfortunately, folks who upgrade to the PS5 lose the privilege of enjoying them. Despite playing host to a much more powerful piece of hardware in the PSVR2, complete with a much higher resolution display, Sony has yet to patch in 3D Blu-ray capability to the PS5, even just for playing the discs. And thus, everyone’s 3D Blu-ray collection goes back to collecting dust. And unfortunately, movies are far from alone in the PSVR orphanage.
Original PSVR Games
It’s tacitly understood that VR is a complex medium from a hardware standpoint, so it’s understandable that the PSVR 2 would run into problems playing original PSVR games. The platform is a top-to-bottom overhaul of the original hardware, after all. But it’s still a pretty fierce kick in the teeth to see that upgrading to the PS5’s beautiful new headset means abandoning the original PSVR’s entire library, with very few of those games getting PS5/PSVR 2 upgrades of their own.
Sure, the original headset is technically backward compatible with PS5, but it needs an adapter for the camera you can’t easily buy, isn’t compatible with the PS5’s DualSense controllers, and having full access to the entire wonderful world of VR games on PlayStation means having two headsets sitting around. All that together makes the original headset feel pretty unwelcome outside of its original home on the PS4.
PT
Lastly, but certainly not least in the hearts of many, is PT. Even as a truncated demo for a game that will tragically never exist, PT is a horror masterpiece, a dragon many a developer has spent the last seven years trying to chase. Those lucky enough to still have the game downloaded are now the sole curators of endangered gaming history. Getting ahold of Hideo Kojima’s tragically doomed Silent Hills demo was enough of an annoyance in the immediate aftermath of his firing from Konami. But without even the ability to re-download the game from PSN after it was delisted, holding onto a viable copy of it has been a constant game of corporate keep-away.
One of the first times the PS5 broke our hearts was right after the system launched, and many of us found out the game has been effectively banned from running on the system. And that’s not a technical hitch, either, as a few folks in the gaming press reported the game was working perfectly fine on review unit PS5s until the actual launch day locked it out. While nobody knows whether this was Sony’s call or Konami’s, only one particular fact was loud and clear: If you were lucky enough to have a copy of PT saved on an external drive, and tried to open it on PS5, the only message you get is a simple line telling you the game is only playable–you guessed it–on the PlayStation 4.